Dial Flip Book

Always Down to Pray for Help (inset, verso) (2009)
Private Collection

Homeless (2003)
Private Collection

The County (1997)
Collection of Brett & Lester Levy, Jr.

February (2010)
Private Collection

BLACKNESS IN FEBRUARY

“The shabbiness, even embarrassment, of Hazel Scott playing 'concert boogie woogie' before
thousands of white middle-class music lovers, who all assumed that this music was Miss Scott's
Invention, is finally no more hideous than the spectacle of an urban, college-trained Negro
musician pretending, perhaps in all sincerity, that he has the same field of emotional reference
as his great-grandfather, the Mississippi slave.”

- LeRoi Jones, Blues People: Negro Music in White America, 1999

I had a flash of recognition when I first saw February (2010), and a sudden reminder of the smell
of South Carolina field onions, honeysuckle, and motor oil. I was instantly transported to my
grandfather’s car shed as he was making something. He moved at a deliberate pace unfoiled by
my need to rush, by anyone’s need for, well, anything. He was never unmoored. Gravity planted
firmly in every footstep, in every turn of a screw. That is the weight of humanity I feel in the work of
Mr. Thornton Dial. It is a familiar song I reach for when I am making. It is a place I am compelled
to return to. It's a language loaded with grit, grace, humor, and the weight of centuries of untold
truths in a Black vernacular tongue. A Black visual aesthetic as comfortable and familiar to me
as my grandmother’s quilts, shiny Easter suits, gold hoop earrings, or crisp white t-shirts paired with
fresh sneakers. It is gold teeth and burgundy lipstick. It’s the mood and landscape of Black working
folk.

When I am making, without apology, without self-consciousness, I am seeking the poetry of Black
labor. Black labor defines my Black aesthetic. If Hazel Scott, Nikki Giovanni, Al Green, Thornton
Dial, Kendrick Lamar, and Modjeska Simkins have a shared sensibility, it can be found meandering
through the edges of Black labor and situated firmly in Black abstraction. When I am working, I am
calling on subterfuge, speaking in tongues for the anointed. I am remembering the way labor is
present in all the stories I know of Blackness. The slow deliberate way my grandfather worked, slow
and steady so as not to raise a sweat. To labor long and resolute, but not to break the body. It is
the story of a young versus an old bull. The pace of a pioneering Black organizer or poet. The
masterful way a gospel crooner raises a hymn from the ground with a tap and moan. Slow.
Deliberate. It is my experience of Mr. Dial’s paintings and sculptures. Deliberately layered, making
time with each gesture. Making time, marking time, keeping time.

The materials I am most attracted to whisper at the edges of this tale. Allegory and myth buried
beneath mattresses, found in yards, in closets, wrapped in quilt pieces at the bottom of dried-up
wells. They are the materials of Mr. Dial. I use the detritus of lives lived in anonymity, lived quietly
out of the spotlight and close to the earth. Glass and soil and twine, the materials Mr. Dial uses so
expertly to evoke a closeness to both the natural and supernatural speak to me, drawing from
the lives and hands who held them most, who held them last. Like Mr. Dial, I am drawn to the
physicality of the process, how my body must engage the materials as skillfully as my intellect.
The materials require my care, my sweat, the twitch of muscles. The improvisation present in the
assembled objects carefully spells out a Black experience that I recognize that cuts across class
and geography. They are the materials of my Black
aesthetic.

I find beauty in the juxtaposition of the plastic skin of

a doll against a rusted bale of wire unified through an

application of paint, through a careful consideration

of objects positioned to sing a familiar rhythm by

virtue of duplication. The labor of doing something

over and over again. The syncopation. The beat.

Working has a rhythm that keeps me close to the

earth. Place is significant. The objects I use come from

places close to my life, my history, my family, and my

community history. I draw from the same well as Mr.

Dial. I find refuge in these spaces, often situating my

images in Black spaces. Spaces marked by time, by

history, by sweat, tears, and labor in the spaces of

ceremony, revival, and daily life. I am committed to

expressing the same emotional sincerity. My Michaela Pilar Brown - READY, 2018
experience is not Mr. Dial's, it's not my photo courtesy of the Artist
grandfather's. Kendrick is in the continuum of Amiri

Baraka and Sonia Sanchez. The experience of his Blackness may carry a similar resonance, but it is

different. What we are all seeking is the sincerity of expression - a truth telling to be found among

the layers in the work. The piling on of words, layers of soda-pop labels reimagined as collage, the

multi rhythmic delivery of verse. Kendrick's flow.

Mr. Dial’s February is loaded with the sophisticated language of the Black vernacular traditions
that inform my work. Trash-talking old men beneath a canopy of trees. Black joy. Black thought.
Black memory and Black labor. It carries the refined syncopation and improvisation that I seek in
moments of deep listening and looking.

- Michaela Pilar Brown

Advertising (sculpture, right, and collage, above)
(undated)
Collection of the Estate of William Sidney Arnett

Clockwise from top-left: Gymnastic Girl (undated)
Jumping for Joy (undated)
both works Collection of the Estate of Thornton Dial
Twisting Around the Colors (undated)
Blown Away (undated)
both works Collection of Rebecca & Jack Drake

Clara’s Dream (2005)
Private Collection

The Indian Is Still Here (1991)
Collection of Doug McCraw

THE INDIAN IS STILL HERE

I am the descendant of enslaved African people.

Although I have been making a narrative about colonialism for the past 20 years, my original
emphasis was different. At first, I was just trying to discover who I am and where I came from.
Being an African American is an interesting designation, especially when you consider all the
hyphenates that you have to put in when you’re not purely African. In the United States it doesn't
matter if you're Irish or 10% French, British, Romanian, whatever, Polish, or Japanese, or Korean or
Argentinian. It doesn't really matter. If you have one drop of Black blood, you're Black.

That's where I started. Over time I discovered some indigenous ancestry through my family’s oral
histories. For a time I went by Frohawk Two-Feathers. When I decided to get rid of this moniker, this
pen name, I embraced my identity as a Black American male.

When I work, I usually do six months of research and six months of execution. Researching historical
documents and books and films while I'm figuring out what narrative I'm going to tell, and then
kind of subvert later. I chose 1658 to start my narrative - the end of the English civil war, the death
of the Lord Protector of England Oliver Cromwell. I found this to be a valuable point in history
where you can shift the narrative a little bit.

Colonialism changed the globe. When people talk about changing the world, they think it's an
instantaneous thing. I used this to re-address and reconfigure what I wanted to say about my
ancestry, where I fit into the story, and where I am going.

What I do is look at the real things that have happened - what you can see; what is documented.
You have to combine all these things to tell the story of the malleable points in history.

It is necessary that we have these things to draw from. It's also necessary that we try to be as
truthful as possible. I think it is ultimately damaging to subsequent generations if we're not telling
the truth. Which is why we're still arguing about things that should not be arguments to this day.

The Penny Girls (1997)
Private Collection

When I think about people like Thornton Dial, growing up when he grew up resonates with the
tragedies and triumphs, the ills, and the greats of the world. Conversely, I've been in the creative
world for the vast majority of my life. My father was a playwright; my mother in theater. It gives me
the feeling that I had an advantage over a lot of people who look like me because my parents
impressed upon me the need for scholarly pursuits.

But then you think about Thornton Dial - he grew up and stayed in Alabama - a place that
brought so many of the ills of colonization into the modern era. From enslavement to
Reconstruction and the sharecropper system, and on to the migration from the South during the
Jim Crow era is understandable. But Mr. Dial stayed and made his career there. It's just fantastic
that he was able to create these worlds while still being in this environment.

Throughout my research I was also able to learn how my first relatives came to America in the
1790s through Mobile, Alabama. Then there is another side of my family who ended up on the
Foster Plantation just outside of Tuscaloosa. When I made the shift back to my birth name, I was
trying to find this cosmic perspective because I kept getting frustrated with the world as it is,
because I feel people enjoy conflict at a point, and there's things that need to happen.

The United States should have paid Black people reparations a long time ago, but now it seems
America has doubled down on the race issue out of fear of retaliation. I'm not saying it's in human
nature to enslave people and make a system like Jim Crow, but how do we heal?

So that's the kind of the Alabama magic I’m familiar with. Thornton Dial, growing up in Bessemer,
made this incredibly layered work. It's so refreshing and it's so…dazzling in its execution. His work
exists in two realms - an intensity of purpose and somewhere beyond what you see.

What you see is what draws you in, a little silver spoon, or the fishing lures. That's the lure, literally
and figuratively. It's the shiny part that flips through the water and cuts the sunlight, gets the glints
in your eyes, and gets you to want to take in more.

Untitled Can Man (c. 1988)
Private Collection

I try to think beyond the surface of the canvas. And I think that's what the genius of a lot of
Thornton’s art is, not only is he thinking in the moment but he's also thinking in the past. And that's
why it's a travesty that it took this long for this man to get his due in the fine art world. Thornton Dial
is one of the undiscovered geniuses of the south.

Another thing that people don't really acknowledge about him is that he was very aware, at such
a young age, of what was happening around him. Especially in terms of the Black artists that
came before him, he knew he was in for an uphill battle.

I think most people see it as odd that in The Indian Is Still Here the Native person has blonde hair,
which can be indicative of the Native Americans you see who run casinos. The way Dial chose the
paint, with the blonde hair and the face red, is interesting from the artist's perspective.

These are the Indigenous people of this land. But the experience is similar to African Americans in
the South - you have the more fair skinned people working at the top and the darker faces at the
bottom. This still goes on today, so there's colorism everywhere, but I still wonder if this is what he
was thinking when he made this piece, with the red face and the blonde hair.

He had seen the future. He knew what was going to happen.

The zenith and the nadir, like the zenith is American white privilege, and the nadir of America's
natives and African Americans, because we can't change our appearance, we can't be anything
other than Black or Native. Although, at the end of the day, we're all humans.

Always being “on” is unsustainable, but it's all about power and dynamics. So again, with Mr. Dial,
he's the voice, the voice for the silent. And I think that's just an amazing thing.

- Umar Rashid

Top: The Beginning of the World (1987)
Middle: Operators (1987)
Bottom: Singers (1987)
All works Collection of the Estate of
William Sidney Arnett

The Little Tigers and the Man that Came to the Jungle (1988-1989)
Collection of Doug McCraw.

Men Discussing a Shoe (1987)
Collection of the Estate of William Sidney Arnett

What do you think an artist is?

Having a Bad Day (undated)
Collection of the Estate of Thornton Dial

"What do you think an artist is? An imbecile who has only his eyes if he’s a painter, or ears if
he’s a musician, or a lyre at every level of his heart if he’s a poet, or even, if he’s a boxer,
just his muscles? On the contrary, he’s at the same time a political being, constantly alive to
heartrending, fiery, or happy events, to which he responds in every way. How would it be
possible to feel no interest in other people and by virtue of an ivory indifference to detach
yourself from the life which they copiously bring you? No, painting is not done to decorate
apartments. It is an instrument of war for attack and defense against the enemy."

- Pablo Picasso, from an interview with Simone Téry, 1945



Facing Page: Performing (Watching Sports) (1994)
Private Collection.

This Page: Clockwise from top-left. Untitled (1990)
Private Collection

Untitled (1990)
Collection of the Estate of William Sidney Arnett

Looking Out (2003)
Private Collection

Game Time (Contest) (1994)
Private Collection

The Way a German Man Makes Art (2003)
Private Collection

Business on the Road (2000)
Private Collection

World Peace (1994)
Collection of Robert S. Taubman

In the Mind of Emelle (2012)
Collection of Robert S. Taubman

PUTTING THE DAMAGE ON

Finding out that Mr. Thornton Dial suffered from a stroke, considered a Traumatic Brain Injury (TBI),
and then seeing firsthand how it may have affected his work was immensely intriguing. Being an
artist with Post-TBI myself, an adult survivor of a childhood benign (noncancerous) brain tumor, I’m
always interested in how artists working through physical challenges manage, and how or if those
adaptations show up in the work.

In looking at Mr. Dial’s work, there is a marked difference between earlier work and work made in
his later years. In several later pieces there is a softness both in his palette - a single pastel mauve-
taupe for instance - and his signature found object relief. This difference in Mr. Dial’s work can be
seen by comparing later pieces like In the Mind of Emelle (2012) and Looking Back, Fear No Evil
(2010) with earlier works like Coming in From the Background (1996) or How Things Work: The
Parade of Life (1992). This reminds me of the geological wisdom in how younger mountains like the
Himalayas have higher, sharper peaks than the more aged mountains rounded and softened by
millions of years of erosion like the Appalachians. But unlike deeptime erosion, a stroke is an event
that suddenly jars, having both physiological/bodily and neurological/cognitive implications.

I was 12 years old when I was diagnosed with a brain tumor in 1989. The major effect of the brain
tumor removal surgery was that I suffered partial paralysis. I’d lost fine motor control in my right
hand and fingers, with some right-side balance issues. My first attempt at drawing with my right
hand was terrible: this new deficit in motor skill manifested itself as a hyper-pixelated, barely
connected series of jagged lines.

On the other hand, literally the first drawing I did with my left hand revealed that my sensibility and
physical stroke were the same as drawings done with my right hand before the surgery. This for me
was a revelation in itself, an early lesson in something like a perceptualism, that what an artist did,
their mark or line, was as much or more a sign of how they perceived the world as how well their
hands/bodies worked to reproduce it. Drawing with my left hand only continued to improve, so I
moved on with left-hand dominance.

Over the span of my early adulthood to now, this Post-TBI has played out in ways one could
imagine with that kind of insult to the brain, then in other ways that neuroscience itself has only

come to understand in the last 20 years, because surviving brain tumors was rare before 1989, so
there were few long term studies.

Artistically, Post-TBI pushed me into three adaptive
modes of creating:

1) digital collaged image-making, where I could
get my ideas out quickly without struggling with
the logistics of securing and handling material,
the most physical preparatory, and later, safe
storage and archiving aspects of an artist’s
practice;

2) black and white assisted automatic paint pour
imagery; and finally,

3) a return to painting and drawing, where this Inset: Jakob Dwight - MSK02 (00225) (2010-2014)
last path is one that started out on for my Still from the series Autonomous Prism, Commissioned
participation in Digital Combines, the group by the Seattle Art Museum. Photo courtesy of the Artist.
exhibition at Los Angeles’s Honor Fraser Gallery
sees me re-engaging my beginnings in oil and
acrylic paint, charcoal, pen, marker, and pencil.

In the first mode of adapting to these neurological/physiological challenges, I began playing with
digital image-making. Again, it was partly getting away from anything that may have slowed
down getting my ideas out quickly, creating without relative confines of material or supplies, no
stretching, no losing work to clumsiness, no concern over my physical deficits.

At the time I was studying Arte Povera. It made a difference in how I decided to approach digital
image-making, employing that movement’s same emphasis on the “poetically minimalistic”
image, asking myself of the computer generated image: "in a medium that could allow endless
collage, where almost anything was possible, what would the indispensable or significant mark or
image look like?"

This moved me to set studio limits for myself, where I couldn’t do anything digitally that an artist
could not reasonably do in a real world studio. So cutting/copying/pasting, stenciling (masking),
color replacement, layering, and collaging were allowed, but things like using physics generators
like lightning renderers, for instance, or no computer processing, were not. I was determined not to
let the software speak for me, in an effort to maintain my “hand”, my own unique gesture, to
remain humane.

In the second mode, I began making paint pours, quickly shifting around black and white paint
with a paint scraper, with each painting taking no more than 20 seconds. At the time, I was
fascinated by the sonic feature called granular synthesis, basically a note drawn out to reveal a
spectrum of smaller units of sound. I wanted to represent this effect visually. Again, this kind of
assisted automatism allowed me to get out ideas with as little bodily resistance as possible.

The latest mode, more than two
decades later, has me returning to my
training in painting with a brush on an
upright canvas. Self-referentially pulling
from a mostly generative digital
archives of works amassed over my last
20 years, bringing imagery off screen to
canvas.

Seeing firsthand the ways in which a

major neurological event such as a

stroke may have changed Mr. Dial’s Jakob Dwight exhibiting in Digital Combines at Honor Fraser Gallery,
work from his earlier to later pieces Los Angeles (2022), curated by Claudia Hart. Photo by Jeff McLane.

reminded me of bodily adaptations in my own work. A geologist’s ability to determine the age of

mountain ranges relative to one another by form alone comes by way of respecting time and

erosion, a story of millions of years. Likewise, the ways in which adaptation to life events can drive

the evolution of an artists' output always call for greater investigation of what was going on in their

lives (and bodies) through different periods of their oeuvres by scholars, critics, curators, and

collectors alike.

- Jakob Dwight

How Things Work: The Parade of Life (1992)
Collection of Doug McCraw

One Eye Open, One Closed (undated)
Collection of the Estate of Thornton Dial

Looking Back, Fear No Evil (2010)
Private Collection

Separation (2015)
Collection of the Estate of Thornton Dial

Looking for the Treasures in the Big Man’s Yard (1993)
Collection of Doug McCraw

SURFACE & MEDIUM, THE QUIET PART OUT LOUD

The surface of a painting is a uniting force. It captures color, the image and perceptual condition,
along with the textual identity of the material being used. The inescapable depth I experienced in
Thornton Dial’s paintings was what attracted me initially. Coupled with his paintings' palpable
density and their monumental presence, the surfaces of Dial’s paintings are rich and gratifying.
There is a dialogue to be had regarding their surface, and both observed density and literal
density as they relate to abstraction and representation. It’s this relationship that I find most
intriguing. As an artist primarily focused on painting, I appreciate the surface. Particularly, its role
as a catalyst in viewing a painting. The surface tensions present in Dial’s 1993 painting, Looking for
the Treasures in the Big Man's Yard, employs surface in ways that subversively initiates our intimate
Investigation. Dial demands our attention and holds us close as we try to understand and quantify
what it is that we see.

A painting’s surface can tell its own story. At times, one that overlaps an overarching narrative
and at times reinforces a painting's context. Greater than the sum of its parts, a good surface
transforms into a quiet medium, operating on its own. The relationship between a painting’s
surface and the content influences how we choose to engage and view a painting. In my work,
I consider these variables as possibilities for expression. There are times when arrangements of
colors are tasked with the responsibility to create an illusion of a deep depth of field. Conversely,
the colored pigments might be applied with a heavy hand, creating an impasto passage of
paint. In doing this, a riff occurs, and the painting oscillates between exhibiting a deep picture
space through its color, while its texture suggests a pictorial space that reflects the painting
support. Trapped within this visual experience, a shallow depth of field emerges in a
nonconventional way.

These ideas regarding surfaces sit on a spectrum. It is rewarding to see them at play in Thornton
Dial’s paintings. I typically work within the limits in the middle of the spectrum. Dial seemingly works
with the farthest extremes. The flat support for Dial’s Looking for the Treasures in the Big Man's Yard,
is almost completely covered by a range of differently scaled objects. Existing beyond the
parameters of assemblage, the sheer density of his surface is mind-altering. It walks a tightrope
between additional material added to a flat surface and justifiably, a new dimensional surface all

together. At times protruding outward, up to ten inches from the painting support, Dial creates
cave-like niches of space with the use of chicken wire and what appears to be molded fabric
and rope. This expands the paintable surface area by many times over, giving Dial the opportunity
to saturate the support with items almost hidden in painterly passages. His arrangement of
compounded objects and dense textures come together in a topographic tapestry. From afar,
it reads as a pure abstraction, his palette presents a much flatter painting. A play between dark

and light cascades across an illusionistic plane. Chro-
matic black, umber, sienna, white and small amounts of
yellow, red, and green make up the color palette. Read-
ing as predominantly neutral, Dial’s palette works to con-
ceal protrusion. It camouflages, interrupted only by cast
shadows and bright highlights. The surface blends into the
painting's color field.

This visual symphony is inviting. From a closer vantage

point, the passive uniformity of the color palette begins to

dissolve. The surface of the painting shifts and becomes

fully representational. Not in the pictorial sense. Rather, in

Inset: Leslie Smith III - Slavish Devotion, 2020 the sense that individual components start to reveal
Photo courtesy of the Artist. themselves. A recognizable toy doll appears. The pattern

of chicken wire and rope became real. The folly of embedded objects creates a realistic space.

A stage of sorts that exhibits these treasures in a representational diorama-like space. It is fascinat-

ing how distinctly different this viewing experience is from viewing the painting from a distance. I

often consider the transition between color and texture to introduce aspects of familiarity. Working

within the parameters of abstraction, I’m eager to create an alternative reclamation of represen-

tation, one captured within the mind of the viewer. In his own way, Dial attains this by altering our

perception of his painting. His paintings allow a sustained impasse with pure abstractions while fos-

tering a conversation with representation through his choice of construction and assemblage. Dial

has an outstanding command of the space he intends to employ. His control is both efficient and

effortless. Dial’s solutions are timeless and rival the most contemporary of techniques touted by

practitioners today.

-Leslie Smith III

Antioch (2015)
Private Collection

Sunset (2015)
Collection of the Estate of Thornton Dial

Patching the Wounds (2015)
Collection of the Estate of Thornton Dial

Image credit goes here with inner edge 2.5 inches from gutter in
10pt Atlanta and lining up bottom edge .5 inches from page
edge

We are made by history.

Image credit goes here with inner edge 2.5 inches from gutter in
10pt Atlanta and lining up bottom edge .5 inches from page
edge

"We are not makers of history. We are made by history.”
- Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Strength To Love, 1963

Image credit goes here with inner edge 2.5 inches from gutter in
10pt Atlanta and lining up bottom edge .5 inches from page
edge

Image credit goes here with inner edge 2.5 inches from gutter in
10pt Atlanta and lining up bottom edge .5 inches from page
edge

Thornton Dial, Sr. (American, 1928–2016), Lost Americans, 2008, mixed media on wood, Mont-
gomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, Association Purchase and Gift of the
Souls Grown Deep Foundation from the William S. Arnett Collection, 2021.4.2

Image courtesy of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts

LOST AMERICANS

Like many of the most powerful works by Mr. Thornton Dial, Lost Americans (2008) takes the
viewer by storm. This work is not an “easy” read. The dark, massed assemblage of deep and
dense layers of found materials gives the sense of something that has washed up from the
depths of the ocean and been strewn before us on the wall like flotsam. And deciphering it
requires, even demands, our time. Discerning the various forms emerging from its surface,
contemplating their placement and relationships, disentangling them from an overall
accumulation that seems jumbled incoherently, is the first step in looking at and into Mr.
Dial’s constructions.

In Lost Americans the aggregate of materials visually coalesces into a large figure at the left
who appears to be striding forward, impeded by a mass that includes a part of a broken
trunk, a partial section of a wooden rocker (whose form might also suggest a plow), and the
suggestion of a second figure who may be following or pushing from behind. The entire
work was originally painted red, white, and blue, but was painted over with a deep gray
pigment. Small pieces of evidence of the previous colors emerge in sections of the
work. The composition and its independent elements suggest the concept of transit
encumbered by “baggage” such as the trunk or the plow. Both of those elements held
heavy significance for Black Americans of the past, with connections to enslavement,
sharecropping, and migration in search of a better life, with every stage involving loss, or
being “lost”. The artist recognized how 20th Century American society was burdened by a
tendency to violence, historical and contemporary, as a result of deep cultural discord,
leaving some of her citizens disconnected and left behind; failing to achieve the happiness
and prosperity others took for granted. This damage to America’s traditional social
compact continues to have ramifications well into the 21st century.

Mr. Dial’s art transcends the labels that have sometimes been used to categorize it. In 2021,
the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts joined some 16 other prestigious art collecting
institutions in the US in adding examples of art by Mr. Dial to its collection representing
American art of the 20th century. Rather than being art that is only relevant to us here in
Alabama or the South, this work has come to represent the many important themes that
resonate in American history of the last century—those that relate to social changes

represented by the Civil Rights Movement, the social shifts from the rural to the industrial and
urban environment, and the economic shifts that increasingly came to divide America by
race, class, and educational status. These works address these themes with innovation and
ingenuity, and deliver powerful messages about the America that we know today.

- Margaret Lynne Ausfeld

Thornton Dial, Sr. (American, 1928–2016), Life Begin at the Tail, 1993, pastel and charcoal on paper,
Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts, Montgomery, Alabama, Association Purchase, 2012.14.4
Image courtesy of the Montgomery Museum of Fine Arts